Some of the major technological applications for unsaturated aliphatic diacid anhydrides, particularly maleic anhydride, grafted polyolefins is to form adhesive olefin polymers, compatibilized olefin polymers, and reversible crosslinked base resins. Maleic anhydride grafted polyolefins also find utility as adhesion promoters because of their compatibility with polar copolymers such as ethylene/ethyl acrylate copolymers, ethylene/vinyl acetate copolymers, polyesters, and polyamides because of the nature of the anhydride.
Because of its low melt/flow indices and other physical characteristics, maleic anhydride grafted high density polyethylene is considered to be particularly suited to rotomolding. Unfortunately, the technique for grafting maleic anhydride to the high density polyethylene is conducive to scorch, i.e., premature crosslinking, and the various methods, which have been developed to control scorch, show little benefit for high density polyethylene. Further, the scorch control additives tend to decrease the modulus of the grafted product while rotomolding applications require the retention of high modulus.